The present invention relates to the provision of online records, including financial and legal documents and managing of financial and legal services. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing a means for consumers to request their legal documents from legal service providers, store their legal documents, and provide for private communications between the consumers and their legal service providers.
Legal documents can be particularly sensitive communications. Laws and attorney regulations place confidentiality limitations on legal records. In addition, certain legal documents such as legal opinions communicated from attorneys to clients may be privileged communications. The privilege may be lost if the information is communicated to others.
In addition to legal records, certain records may be closely associated with legal records. These include certain health records such as health care power of attorneys. In addition certain financial records may be associated with legal records, such as those financial records necessary for preparing tax returns or other financial disclosures.
One problem with legal documents is the number of such documents which an individual, family, or small business, will develop over time. If all records are maintained, organization of the documents may be difficult and time-consuming. Without proper organization, finding particular records can be time-consuming or otherwise problematic.
To some extent, service providers may be relied upon to maintain certain records. For example, lawyers or accountants may maintain copies of certain records for a limited time. However, they may charge a fee for providing copies of records. In addition, they may have document retention policies which require destruction of records after a given time period. Thus, individuals or other entities maintain their own copies of legal records, financial records, and other types of records.
Of course, whenever records are routinely maintained by an individual or service providers such as lawyers or accountants, there is still the possibility of records being destroyed such as in fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and the like. Thus there are various problems with maintaining legal, financial records, and related records.
Another problem relates to conveying legal records. It should be appreciated than individual or entity may be represented by multiple attorneys or law firms for different matters. As such, a great deal of correspondence and documentation may be generated and communicated back and forth between a customer and each attorney. Such information may be difficult to organize as previously discussed. In addition, documents relating to a matter associated with one attorney may be relevant to another matter being handled by another attorney. Thus, it may difficult, time-consuming, costly, or otherwise problematic to selectively disseminate information between attorneys, accountants, or other service providers.
Another problems relates to the offering of unbundled legal services. Recently, there has been increased interest in lawyers providing unbundled legal services to their clients. In such instances, a client takes on more responsibility and the lawyer takes on less responsibility with limited representation. Unbundled legal services provides the potential advantage to the client of being able to reduce legal costs. Yet, lawyers may be resistant to providing unbundled legal services because significant time and effort may be required to limit their representation and determine whether unbundled legal services are appropriate in a particular instance. In addition, collection of information from clients or potential clients can be problematic, and multiple requests for information or other documentation from clients or potential clients may be required. Moreover, because of the reduced reliance on lawyers to provide legal services, it is increasingly important that an individual or entity maintain their own complete legal records.
Another problem relates to the use of prepaid legal services. Prepaid legal services typically involve an individual or group employee benefit plan in which members pay a periodic charge (such as a monthly fee or premium) in exchange for access to certain legal services. In such instances, it becomes increasingly important for individual members to be able to be able to provide documentation to the lawyer or lawyers who provide services under the plans and for the lawyer or lawyers to be able to communicate with the individual members in a cost effective manner. There may be significant lawyer time or administrative overhead in communicating necessary legal documents and other information back and forth between an attorney and a client.
Thus, there is a general lack of recognition of the need to provide secure and private communications between a legal or financial services provider and their client and to do so in a manner that is convenient for both the provider and the client. There is also a general lack of recognition of the problems for an individual to be able to store and maintain those records in one secured, password protected account that allows for files to be organized.